Description

The emphasis of the school will be to combine a pedagogical introduction to the physics of magnetoelectric phenomena with a comprehensive overview of the most recent theoretical and experimental advances in this hot and rapidly expanding field of research. This school is a follow-up to the highly successful schools that took place under the auspices of the European Network of Excellence FAME in Grenoble (2007) and Girona (2008).

The school will be attended by over 70 young researchers working in both theory and experiment, who will be brought together with a team highly recognized experts in the field. Attendees are expected to participate actively during the tutorials and are encouraged to present posters describing their own research.

The topics to be covered include:

- fundamentals of the theory of multiferroic materials with a focus on microscopic mechanisms that describe the magnetoelectric coupling, phenomenological descriptions of coupled orders in multiferroic materials and ab-initio calculations of the magnetically-induced electric polarization

- modern experimental techniques used to study competing phases and novel elementary excitations in materials with coupled magnetic and ferroelectric orders, including resonant X-ray and polarized neutron scattering, and linear and non-linear optical probes

- thin film growth and control of the physical properties of multiferroic materials

- the structure of topological defects, such as domain walls, in materials with several ferroic orders